“When it comes to bartenders, you often can divide them into two teams: The ones who hunt down flavours and love the idea of putting many of them in a glass, and the ones who love the idea of using as few ingredients as possible. Both ways can create awesome drinks. It is more a question of personal style,” explained Joerg.

“Next to some basil affairs, I am more the second type of bartender,” Joerg continued.

“I love classic cocktails, and for me a truly perfect drink has as few ingredients as possible. If you ask someone for a drink, and he or she serves you a two ingredients drink, this person has courage.”

Examples of such drinks are The Rusty Nail: “a famous two-part drink, often terribly sweet, sometimes executed by a master as a perfect drink,” Joerg continued.

The Padovani is the modern version of this idea, a drink that Joerg mixes a lot of in his Cinchona Bar in Zurich. He also enjoys playing around with dozens of versions of Gin & Tonics: “I have fallen in love with this kind of strong, two ingredients player.”

“You learn over time that in a two ingredients drinks, there is no place to hide cheap or weak ingredients. Two ingredient drinks are very honest; they tell you everything about the bartender and the ingredients.”

Regaling a story from a few years ago, Joerg recounts that he invited Hidetsuego Ueno to attend as a guest at Le Lion Bar de Paris, a masterclass on Japanese ice handling: “I talked to him about my love for simple drinks, and I knew that he agreed with me.”

Joerg continued: “I will never forget the first time I met him on the Cocktail & Spirit Stage in Paris, where he served us all the Bamboo Cocktail. His White Ladies are legendary. From then I knew, this was the right person to talk to about perfect and simple drinks.”

It was during an afternoon playing around behind Le Lion Bar with Ueno that Joerg was introduced to Cherry Heering: “He introduced me to a simple yet difficult Cherry Heering drink, the Hunter Cocktail.”

“He mixed me about two parts of a strong Noah’s Mill Bourbon with one part of Cherry Heering, and served it with his well-known smile. BOOM. I loved it. Bourbon and Cherry Heering. That’s it. You do not need anything more to create the perfect drink.”

Following this encounter, Joerg began to practice mixing to perfect the ratio: “After that first perfect sip of a Hunter mixed by Ueno, I started to search my library for this drink and I found a few old recipes. The oldest I could find was from 1914.”

“Jacques Straub calls in his book Drinks, for a one to two ratio with Rye Whiskey. Ueno explained to me that he had changed it because Bourbon was a perfect match, and I agreed.”

On this note, Joerg started to play around with “different, younger and elegant Ryes,” finally settling on Vulson Old Rye for the perfect Hunter, with a modern twist.

Ivan Avellaneda’s mother was born into a dark time for Colombia. In Paris, he celebrates her birth with Latin flavours.

“My parents are my strength for everything,” says Ivan Avellaneda, who made his name by progressing from bar back to general manager at Candelaria, Paris, the Latin-American bar that’s been a fixture on the World’s 50 Best since 2012. 1954 was the year his mother, Rebeca, was born, and his cocktail, That’s All Right, Mama, pays tribute to her.

The 50s were a dark period for Colombia. La Violencia, a civil war sparked by the assassination of a progressive politician, began in 1948: by 1954, a brutal military dictatorship was in place. Avellaneda sees the decade as a dividing line that slices Colombian history in two. “It’s really interesting to think that my mother and my father were born into a lot of political and security troubles,” he says.

Although Rebeca has such a sweet palate that Avellaneda thinks she’d rather drink Peter Heering neat than in a cocktail, she inspires many of her son’s creations. “It’s really funny, because she doesn’t even drink too much alcohol,” he says. “But when I try to think about a cocktail or a dish or whatever I want to propose to a guest, I always think about her enjoyment face.”

The bittersweet notes of Avellaneda’s long drink reflects the bittersweet nature of the year 1954 in his mind, yet he has used few overtly Colombian elements. “I was supposed to maybe work with a lot of fruits and tropical stuff, but I wanted to go a bit away from the ordinary,” he says. “Fernet Branca Menta, which is really aromatic and quite strong in flavour, represents a lot of sensations I used to have when I was a kid, because we do like mint a lot in Colombia, and we used to drink a lot of mint tea.”

For someone who has only just entered his fourth decade, Avellaneda has had a diverse career. He trained and practised as a psychologist in Colombia, then worked as a headhunter before coming to Paris to study for a master’s in psychotherapy. Starting as a part-time bar back, he soon replaced his studies with a hospitality qualification to further his goal of progressing to manager.

The bartender as psychologist is something of a cliché. Yet, as one of few people in the world to have worked professionally in both fields, Avellaneda observes that the roles are very different. As a psychologist, he worked first with children living with Down’s Syndrome, autism or other conditions, then to help women traumatised by Colombia’s long conflict.

While rewarding, the work was also gruelling: Avellaneda’s patients might have been gang-raped, abducted, or seen their children murdered before their eyes. “It was really tough to work with them and help them go through life with those memories of things,” he says.

Even if Candelaria were the type of bar where customers treated the bartender as confidant there would be little comparison. “Psychology helped a lot more in my managing skills than in bartending alone,” Avellaneda says. “It helped me to build good, happy, high-performing teams, and it helped me to lead them on the human-focused side.”

A thoughtful, precise man, Avellaneda finds a number of trends in the industry concerning. He sees bars adopting issues like gender equality and environmental sustainability for the sake of fashion, or even as a marketing ploy, when they should be instinctual. The fetish for social media, bloggers and Instagrammers, irritates him.

Having left Candelaria in late 2017, Avellaneda is hoping to open his as-yet-unnamed new place by May 2018. Unsurprisingly for someone known for his expertise in Latin American products, the new place will have a Colombian angle – less predictably, it will be a restaurant, not a bar.

“I do love cocktails, I really enjoy them. I love creating them, I love serving them, I love sharing a glass with people, but I think that now in Paris there are a lot of cocktail bars,” he explains. “I want to open a place for us, where it’s fun, but not too complicated and not too fancy.”

Avellaneda’s partner, also Colombian, is a chef, and the focus will be on the diverse products and spices of a nation that runs from the Amazon rainforest to the snowy Andes, from sweeping grasslands to chilly Bogotá.

As Bogotá’s own bar scene begins to take off, it could be a well-timed move. “Last time I was there, it was quite impressive,” Avellaneda says. “People are starting to do a lot of interesting stuff and we’re opening the market for spirits a little bit more: I’m seeing a lot of new products, a lot of new restaurants with a really cool cocktail offer, and cocktail bars as well.”

And, while a Colombian restaurant in the heart of Paris would have been unthinkable not only in 1954 but as recently as 1994, Avellaneda may have timed his moment well. His mother, no doubt, will be proud.

That`s all right, Mama

1,5 cl Peter heering

4cl Amaro piemontese

1cl Cola/Vanilla/orange blossom syrup

1cl Lemon Juice

0,5cl Fernet Branca menta

4 cl soda

Glass: Rocks

Method: Fill glass with ice and build ingredients

Garnish: Mint sprig and orange twist

Syrup recipe:990ml basic coca-cola (I use a different brand, a cola soda: Fritz Cola from Germany – it’s not too sweet with a lot of vanilla flavour in it). It’s a cola reduction, you heat it up to reduce it to a syrup and take out all the gassy stuff, let it infuse with a little bit of vanilla stick while it’s still a little bit hot. At the end I add a bit more sugar (10g), plus a barspoon of orange blossom to give the aromatic side: that’s even in a big batch. The idea is not to have a really thick consistent syrup, because cocktail is built in the glass, should be easy to mix, the idea is for the syrup to be a little more liquid, and also the ABV on this cocktail is really low, we don’t need too much dilution on it. Better to have really not that big syrups.

Born in upstate New York, Ms. Franky has taken Gotham’s bar scene by storm in her own inimitable style. As part of the team who opened iconic New York institutions The Dead Rabbit & Clover Club, she now heads up the iconic Marie Antoinette-inspired Brooklyn cocktail den Le Boudoir while continuing to educate, inspire and champion heritage brands like Cherry Heering.

From any of the 200 romantic years of Cherry Heering’s story, Ms. Franky chose 1925, when Paris was swinging. “The 1920’s in Paris are known as Les Annees Folles. Or living in the crazy years. So, I chose 1925 midway in between. I was trying to think of that kind of era where it was kind of after World War 1 … and we are talking about Paris, so this time with Paris, when a lot of expats went over there. So again, post World War 1 and just as Prohibition was starting in the US, we had a lot of bartenders and a lot of creative artists moving and kind of hanging out over there, going to cafes all day, going to night clubs at night. Somehow always being productive as well.”

“We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.” Ernest Hemmingway

“Attending saloons, exchanging ideas, yeah, it just seems like a really care-free time although a lot of those artists were starving but somehow they managed drink and eat and just and produce great art.” “It was a period of maybe 10 years when it was just that kind of a fun, free for all, where they didn’t have to worry about too much. Also, around that time we had American women finally getting the right to vote. So there was just a celebration of forgetting about the bad things of the previous decade and just living this kind of hedonistic, free-spirited lifestyle. That’s why they are known as the crazy years!”

“I’m a singer as well. And I used to perform a lot and … so that all appeals to me, that kind of artists or musicians just being able to live in a time when they just didn’t really have many cares as the New York today, where there’s so many things to worry about.”

Ms. Franky is fluent in French and is a Bureau National Interprofessional du Cognac (BNIC) accredited educator and trainer. A keen traveller, she is inspired by international food, drink and cultural experiences which she brings to life in her own decadently stylish corner of the drinks industry – an industry that she sees as getting more complicated by the day.

“I’ve done a couple of talks on the role of the modern bartender, the way we’ve gone from physically making drinks to having to create cocktails, do interviews, write answers in full sentences, learn Excel and Photoshop etc. I spend so much time making drink photos look great, balancing books and learning everything I can just to be more aware, more responsible and up to date. There’s just so much more that goes into a modern bartender’s role.”

Ms. Franky makes a romantic ‘roaring twenties’ claim that if she had a magic wand she’d make sure that people’s talents weren’t being judged on the amounts of likes they get or the amount of followers they have on social media. A good claim but none-the-less a tough one to persuasively maintain in this day and age.

“It’s just things have changed so much and a lot of it is great. A lot of it is really wonderful. The whole immediate exchange of ideas and that kind of thing.” “It can be all about the likes and the followers. They may have 5000 friends on Facebook but there are certain people who are just really great at what they do and don’t have that because they don’t want to play that game and I think it’s unfair that they are penalised for not taking part.”

“I don’t know how we’d fix that. But it’s just kind of endemic in culture in general as you can see in politics as well.”

“I just think it’s a little bit unfortunate that we just don’t seem to have a lot time to do a lot of research. It’s just kind of looking at social media with one eye and saying, “Are they popular? Great, we’ll go after that one.”

Re-discovering heritage brands is a joy for many bartenders and Ms. Franky is no exception. “It seems like it’s always one of those bottles that was just always there and I didn’t know what it was or what to do with it. But I distinctly remember always seeing this Cherry Heering around. A few years ago they started a campaign with Coffee Heering and that kind of brought the whole Heering brand back in front view. It’s just kind of one of those iconic liqueurs that was always there on the back bar, or sometimes buried somewhere else but it was always kind of there, which I think says a lot.”

A responsible leader, a relationship builder and just straight up honest, Ms. Franky is one of those instantly connective people who’ll tell you like it is, serve it like it was meant to be served and always has room on her Facebook page for a new friend.

MS. FRANKY MARSHALL’S LES ANNÉES FOLLES

.75 oz Cherry Heering

.25 oz Dark Crème de Cacao (Such as Tempus Fugit Cacao à la Vanille)

1 oz VS Cognac (Such as Cognac Park Carte Blanche)

1 dash Angostura Bitters

Top with 1.5 oz of Dry Sparkling Wine (Such as Champagne)

Method: Stir first 4 ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled glass. Top with champagne and briefly stir to integrate

Nico de Soto is one of those bartenders whose resume you get jealous of just looking at it. Mama Shelter. Experimental Cocktail Club. Curio Parlor. 69 Colebrooke Row. Happiness Forgets. How does one person even get to work at all of those bars? The answer is that he’s extremely talented, works harder than just about anyone else, and he deserves every second of it.

Born and raised in Paris, Nico began his career in his home town in 2005. But not even the magic of one of the world’s greatest cities could contain him and two years later he moved to Melbourne, Australia to work behind the bar there. And for a year he crafted libations and learned even more about the flavors of the world.

I was asking Nico about some of his Cherry Heering memories, and he told me this great one from 2009. He was working at the Cannes Film Festival for the distributor of Cherry Heering in France, and staying at the very lavish Hotel Martinez. We don’t really have hotels like the Hotel Martinez in the States. It’s extremely nice. So, naturally there were a ton of movie stars staying in the hotel as well. Anyway, to hear Nico describe it, he says that every time he walked out of the back door where a crowd was gathered to catch a glimpse of someone famous, the reaction of everyone was disappointment at his lack of fame.

But here’s the funny thing: Nico is one of the biggest celebrities in the bar business. I was watching television late one night and there he was, making cocktails with Martha Stewart. I open up a magazine, and there he is talking about clarified milk punches. He owns two of the best bars in the world, one of which (Danico, in Paris) is located in the historical Galerie Vivienne.

He’s passionate about cocktails, flavors, and food. His extensive travels have informed a colorful palate of flavors on the menu at his bars. He preaches sustainability in cocktails, not only in the ingredients he selects and the way he runs his bars, but in the lifestyle he approaches with balance. Nutrition and health are every bit as important to him as selling alcoholic beverages.

When we asked Nico to select a year he replied, without hesitation, that he’d like to celebrate the year 2015. It was a big year for Nico. Sure, in 2014 he was named the Most Influential French Bartender at the Cocktails Spirits Bar Show in Paris, and in 2017 he was in the Top Four for International Bartender of the Year at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans. But on March 31, 2015 he opened his first bar, Mace, in New York City. Mr. De Soto specifically dreamed of opening a bar in New York, as it’s his favorite city. High praise from a man who’s visited 83 countries and worked in 31 of them.

The drink is a sort of tribute to the house signature cocktail, a drink called the Mace cocktail. Named after the bar and offered since opening, the Mace cocktail is one of the many house cocktails that are named after and inspired by exotic spices and flavors. The drink is a sort of exploration of the flavors of beet and aquavit, and uses mace to tie the whole thing together.

Nico wanted to create a Cherry Heering cocktail that incorporated beets and aquavit, but also pandan, a sweet, fragrant leaf used in much Asian cooking. Aquavit is combined with Cherry Heering, oloroso sherry, beet juice and pandan leaf, and the whole mixture is cooked sous vide for two hours to release the delicate flavors of the pandan into the cocktail. The mixture is then stirred with ice and strained into a chilled glass, and finally garnished with an orange twist. He names the drink 649East, which is Mace’s address in New York City.

It should come as no surprise that also in 2015, Playboy Magazine named Mace America’s Most Innovative Cocktail Concept. And I think that with this cocktail, the 649East, it’s clear to see how innovation and creativity flows through Nico De Soto. The world of cocktails is lucky to have him.

649 EAST, which is Mace´s address

2oz Aquavit

1/2oz Cherry Heering

1/4oz Oloroso Sherry

1/4oz Beet Juice

1 Pandan leaf

Mix all the ingredients together and cook sous vide for 2 hours at 50C

Stir in a mixing tin, then strain in Nick and Nora, garnish with an orange zest

Tuesday last week, we began the cocktail hour with a recipe I spotted in the 1929 Cocktails de Paris called the Coup de Roulis. The drink was credited to Nyna Myral and Robert Burnier who won first prize in a cocktail competition in Paris with this recipe. The two named their drink after an opérette that opened in Paris in 1928 and still gets performed to this day.

The Coup de Roulis’ aroma showcased the liqueurs’ cherry and orange notes. The sip was a sharp orange and wine flavor that was followed by a sweeter orange and cherry swallow. The swallow also contained a bit of herbal complexity from the gin and dry vermouth as well. Overall, the fruity and sharper notes integrated into an almost raspberry-like flavor.

…How to Make The Melee Cocktail – in twelve Seconds
The Melee Cocktail is an strange Gianfranco Verga origination which can be found upon the menu during this week’s horde bar, Louis 649. Drop in to Louis for well-developed cocktails, extraordinary atmosphere, and, of course, the Melee. Recipe: • 1 oz Gin • 1 oz Meletti Amaro • 1 oz Fino Sherry • 1/4 oz Cherry Heering. Stir over ice, aria in to the aged fashioned potion as great as tip with the lemon twist. (00:32)http://www.cubananews.com/studying-fashion-in-milan-and-paris/1836/